1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to enabling a multitude of participants to publish and subscribe to information artifacts that can be used to rapidly share intelligence data, trigger actions and generate income.
The information artifacts, in the following description called triggers, are designed in such a way that they can be easily created, updated, shared, analyzed and consumed by people as well as by computer-implemented systems.
In addition, the information artifacts can be easily combined, for example, in order to create further enriched information artifacts providing higher levels of insight or invoke predetermined actions once a predetermined set of conditions is fulfilled, thus providing additional value to subscribers with respective additional income potential for publishers.
The term participants shall include, but not be limited to, individuals, businesses and their respective delegates including information systems. A participant may publish one or more triggers, subscribe to one or more triggers, or both.
2. Background of the Invention
A steadily increasing, very large amount of mostly unstructured electronic content is being published worldwide. However, for consumers of such content, it is typically not easy to keep track of, combine, refine and apply such content in an effective way according to their respective needs. For providers of such information, it is typically not easy to effectively monetize their published information.
In addition, while it can be very important for a multitude of consumers to receive crucial information with as little delay as possible, for example for online stock traders, it is typically a significant challenge for providers to deliver such requested information with minimal delays, particularly to large audiences.